Play-Persona: Modeling Player Behaviour in Computer Games

experiences are evaluated and remembered and influence the appraisal of future occurrences to
inform ensuing behaviour.
Damasio defines emotional processes as sets of rational, bodily, and behavioural responses to the
perception (or memory) of an experience [4].
It is possible to see how, as Sanders correctly points out [19], all efforts aimed at engendering
defined experiences and emotions are doomed to failure since experiences and emotional
responses alike are too individual, subjective and rooted in people’s past to be able to scientifically
aim at re-producing them.
It is necessary then to utilize a design philosophy that takes into account players and allows them a
certain leeway for expressing themselves, but without assuming universal emotional responses to
experiences. Such a frame of mind should be accountable for different player’s motivations, goals,
behaviours and belief-systems.
In the domain of user centred design, such a mental tool exists already. Alan Cooper developed a
method called Goal-Directed design [2]. This method makes use of personas - “archetypes that
represent distinct groupings of behaviours, attitudes, aptitudes, goals, and motivations” [3] - to
help developers understand the end user and to foresee its way of interacting with the product.
2.1 Origin and history of personas
Persona is a Latin word and it indicates the mask that actors put on before becoming their
characters, it is a socially agreed convention used to represent certain types. Currently it refers
mostly to “social masks” or roles that all humans have to play on the stage of life [8]. Goffman uses
the term “fronts” to address the different masks that we have to wear according to the different
contexts we are presented with. We must act differently in different settings, as the world is a
stage. It is in this sense that Jung listed it as one of the archetypes populating the human
unconscious.
Personas or fictional identity-constructs have been recognized as fundamental in many creative
practices. In literary theory, Iser [9] introduced the term “implied reader” to address the certain
“reader that a given literary work requires”. Within the frame and the context imposed by the text,
this implied reader makes assumptions, has expectations, defines meanings that are left unstated
and adds details to characters and settings through a "wandering viewpoint". For example, by
Joyce’s own admission, Finnegan’s Wake should be read by “that ideal reader suffering from an
ideal insomnia”. Eco expanded on the concept introducing the “model reader” [6] as “the author’s
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